Yesterday, we took a look at Ferdinand Bardamu’s manosphere manifesto “The Necessity of Domestic Violence,” a thoroughly despicable piece of writing that concludes:
Women should be terrorized by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps.
I decided to take a look at Bardamu’s post yesterday after running across a discussion of it in Reddit’s new FeMRA subreddit, a forum ostensibly devoted to what “women can do to advance men’s rights as women.” It’s a strange little subreddit, started by a man and dominated by some of Reddit’s most unsavory MaleMRAs, some of them banned in the regular Men’s Rights subreddit.
Recently one of the most unsavory of the bunch, calling himself JeremiahGuy this time, posted a link to Bardamu’s domestic violence manifesto, which he hosts on his website. Jeremiah naturally used the discussion as an excuse to post more apologias for domestic “discipline” along the lines of the quote from him I featured yesterday.
But I was a little surprised to see GirlWritesWhat, the blabby FeMRA video blogger who’s captured the hearts of Reddit’s Men’s Rights crowd, step into the conversation with something of a defense of Bardamu’s noxious views. After reading Bardamu’s manifesto – the one advocating that men “terrorize” their women to make them behave – GWW blithely concluded:
I don’t really find too much in the article that strikes me as seriously ethically questionable.
Have I taken that remark out of context? Yes. In context, it’s worse. Here’s the entire quote from her, and a further clarification of her position.
She wasn’t the only one in the discussion to get upvotes for suggesting that men slapping women around from time to time isn’t really such a big deal. MaunaLoona (a MaleMRA) wrote:
Lots of MRAs like to pretend that they care about male victims of domestic violence. But the Men’s Rights movement hasn’t done shit for them. And here, I think, is why: too many MRAs are less interested in helping male victims of domestic violence than they are in providing excuses and justifications for male abusers.
Yup, nagging is abuse, because expecting a man to carry 50% of the house workload is misandry, asking him to contribute is worse, and asking him to do the thing you already asked and he didn’t do is the worst misandry of all!
Dude, no. Nagging is not emotional abuse. You do not get to respond to actual emotional abuse with physical force. You definitely don’t get to respond to nagging with physical force.
Throwing things is not comparable to nagging (really dude?). Throwing things is already physical.
Self-defense stops the moment the threat passes, period.
What? Are you trying to tell me it’s *never* okay to light someone on fire? This isn’t a magic pony ride at Disneyland!
Though it is acknowledged that women in abusive relationships, women with reason to fear for their lives, are more likely to choose another time if they’re going to kill their abuser; ie. pick a time when he’s drunk or asleep to kill him. It’s an ongoing threat, in those cases.
Kitteh — yeah but it’s called battered spouse syndrome (or similar), not nagged spouse syndrome. And idk about there, but it’s only been the last couple of years here that juries took that defense seriously.
@kittehserf, If the abuser is asleep, the wife can call the police. Her life is not threatened if the abuser is asleep. This idea of letting her off for killing suggests that domestic abuse by a male deserves the death penalty when domestic abuse by a female rarely gets punished at all. The wife killing the husband should not be treated less seriously than the husband killing the wife, but too often it is in the society, suggesting that if the husband gets killed “he must have done something to deserve it”. Murderers should not get off the hook just because they are women and those killed are men.
Wow, another necro troll wanders in to show its arse.
Go look up some actual information about abuse victims and how they’re terrorised, fuckwit.
Figures. You can’t come up with a logical response so you just throw insults. I find people like you, who get defensive every time their sexism is pointed out, to be pretty sad. If the wife is not in immediate danger, then she should not be killing people. Why is that so hard for you to understand? You support these insane ideas that “if he hit her, he deserves to die” something no sane person would ever say if a man killed a woman. Stop pretending to preach against sexism if you can’t handle it when people call you out on your own.
Did we just get two different necro trolls on three different months-to-years-old threads within two hours of each other? Wow.
You’re deliberately ignoring the difference between being hit and being abused and terrorized for years. Coincidently, that’s just what MRAs do when they lump all kinds of domestic abuse as the same so they can make up stats that support their agenda.
@ Katz: Is “necro troll” a term that is used on this site to describe anyone who disagrees with the opinion of the majority here? Because considering that you’ve done nothing but throw insults, it seems that the one trolling is you. When someone questions your beliefs, you throw a hissy fit rather than respond with anything logical.
@Kim: While being terrorized for years is certainly worse than being hit once, it still doesn’t mean that murder is okay. There are other solutions. There are other ways of getting help. Too often if a man is murdered by his wife and the wife says she was abused, people assume it is true even if there is no evidence. Many times the man killed was an abuser, but not always. Saying “well if a woman killed a man then he must have done something to deserve it” is sexist. Another point is that often you hear the term “emotionally abusive” in reference to bad ex-husbands yet you almost never hear the same term used for bad ex-wives. It seems that our society only views angry words as abusive if they come out of a man’s mouth. A man is seen as weak if he calls his wife’s words “abusive”. Even if he is hit, he is still seen as weak if he complains. It is common in the comics to see husbands hit by their wives with frying pans and this is treated as a joke. The point I am trying to make here is that people should be treated equally regardless of gender and that doesn’t always seem to be the case.
Nope!
That was easy.
@Katz can you explain what it means then so I can tell if you are guilty of it?
Do you have any evidence that it helps in court? Because the reason police precincts and laws specific to deal with male-on-female domestic abuse were created was that the regular police and courts kept letting men get away with abuse over and over.
Female violence is treated as a joke because it’s not seen as really threatening, and because toxic masculinity heaps scorn on men that are weaker than women. When shit gets real, it’s the man that is expected to control the “bitch” with physical violence.
It’s not wise to jump into a conversation and start pronouncing judgments if you don’t actually understand the words being said.
And it certainly isn’t a compelling case for why others should accept you as the sole arbiter of who is or isn’t guilty of what behaviors.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/11/men-women-prison-sentence-length-gender-gap_n_1874742.html?utm_hp_ref=crime
I do have evidence that men get longer prison sentences than women who commit similar crimes. I consider this perhaps the most serious gender issue that men face today in America (I hate it when the first thing that comes to mind when people talk about men’s gender issues is circumcision. There are much more serious issues. Yes I realize that men’s groups often focus too much on the circumcision issue)
And when it comes to being the victims of domestic abuse, men are in a double bind, because if a woman is striking them if they hit back they are seen as abusers but if they don’t hit back people laugh at them because they “got beat up by a girl”. Usually men decide that being mocked is better than being hated, so they don’t fight back. Yes women are more likely to be seriously injured by domestic violence than men are and should be the main focus of anti-domestic violence programs (I have to give these disclaimers because people automatically assume that if I speak on male gender issues that I don’t care about female gender issues. It is possible to care about both at the same time), however I feel that people should be judged (negatively) by how hard they hit, not by what gender they are.
The race divide is wayyyy steeper than the gender divide on that one. A black woman gets harsher punishment than a white man.
Don’t know what a Necro troll is? Hint: This post is from August 16, 2012 and you responded to comment October 27, 2013.
You don’t seem to know much about “Battered Woman/Spousal Syndrome”, including the fact that it is not in itself a legal defense. Here’s a link to a helpful article about the topic.
Dutton, M. A. (2009, August). Update of the “”Battered Woman Syndrome”” Critique. Harrisburg, PA: VAWnet, a project of the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence/Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
http://www.vawnet.org/applied-research-papers/print-document.php?doc_id=2061
@Katz it wasn’t being said on the page I read until you and kittehserf used it against me (I’m sorry I don’t have time to read all 700 comments on this thread and who knows how many other threads until I chance upon the meaning). I don’t expect to be the sole arbiter of who is guilty, but I deserve as much chance as you do at deciding. It just seems like you use it against people you disagree with rather than people actually guilty of it. Yes there is a lot of bad behavior in the MRA community, but the attitude that seems to be common in the threads on this site that any talk of male gender issues is wrong seems sexist to me. The genders should be treated equally which means that we should look out for the concerns of both genders. Just because women have more issues facing them doesn’t mean they are the only ones.
@vaiyt: The fact that blacks may have it worse than men when it comes to the court system does not excuse the double standard when it comes to gender. The difference in sentencing by gender isn’t small: Men getting 63% more time for the same type of crimes, much less likely to avoid sentencing, and are twice as likely to get jail time.
@Brooked: Okay, got it. I followed a link in. I didn’t just randomly search the website. There shouldn’t be anything wrong with commenting on an old page, especially since so many people have gotten back into the discussion. Secondly Katz and kittehserf were using “troll” to mean “person they disagree with” which isn’t helpful in the discussion.
Thank you for the link. I do agree that battered spouses should have a lower punishment if they kill their spouse, but I still don’t think murder is justified unless their life was immediately at risk. I think it is wrong to say “well he was an abusive husband so he deserved to die” because I doubt anyone would say that for an abusive wife.
I’m not convinced that people pointing going “ugh, thread necromancy, piss off” counts as people “getting back into the conversation”.
Hibernia:
Yes, double standards in juidical punishments are a problem. Yes, the erasure of male victims of domestic violence is a problem. Yes, social expectations for men to just “toughen up” are a problem.
But while those arguments are true, I’m not quite seeing what *point* you’re arguing here. You necro’ed this thread with a “murder is not a solution!” point, and then randomly added those arguments which have nothing at all to do with that point.
So, given those problems, which do exist, what is your point here? What are you actually arguing?
Of course women can be emotionally abusive toward their partners. Why on earth do you think this is a big secret that only you know?
The difference is that when people try to leave their abusive partners, women leaving men are much more likely than men leaving women to be killed by the partner they are trying to leave.
When there is an inherent bias in a system, you don’t get equality by treating everyone the same.
Wait, wait, who on here was advocating MURDER as an appropriate response to abuse? What the hell is Hibernia86 even responding to?
For the record, I do agree that killing someone should always be the absolute last resort. I hear people commenting on the court case about Daniel Morcombe’s killer saying how he should be killed for it or they hope he dies in prison, and it disgusts me.
The problem I have with your argument, is your complete disregard for facts and your blithe assertions that equality means treating everyone the same.